Nina Kraviz - fabric 91

Nina Kraviz - fabric 91
While Nina Kraviz was preparing for her last mix CD, 2015's DJ-Kicks, she dug out some old records from her collection, including Exos' Grass Hunter, from 1998. That rediscovery spurred the birth of her трип label, a platform for ultra-deep, sometimes retro techno from a diverse but close-knit group of artists. In the time since her DJ-Kicks, Kraviz's style has become more adventurous, informed by the loads of new music she has lined up for her label and her continued record digging. She's created a fearless, decade-spanning sound, which is on full display in fabric 91. The mix is made of only forthcoming трип material and old obscure records, which makes the old tracks sound new, and vice versa. It's a stunning 80 minutes that shows Kraviz at the height of her powers to surprise, confuse and delight.

The best way to describe Kraviz's DJ style is to say she doesn't give a fuck. Her mixing is erratic: not all of her blends are clean and she jumps between tempos and styles without much regard for continuity. fabric 91 highlights these eccentricities. In one particularly rocky instance, she lets Frak's chaotic "First Snow In Harlem" run out into a beatless intro, before rescuing the mix with a stop-start track from Species Of Fishes and some mad IDM frenzy from Biogen. It's the kind of bizarre moment that could be frustrating, but Kraviz makes it raw and exciting—the sign of a mix that was made in the heat of the moment and not clinically perfected in post-production.

fabric 91 fits a notable 41 tracks into 80 minutes, which is on par with Scuba's Herculean fabric 90. But where that mix was intricately stitched together, Kraviz's is rough and ready, with a fluctuating pace. She lets some tracks ride out and spends less than 15 seconds on others, using them as part of the mix's unique patchwork.

The sound of fabric 91 is about what you'd expect: ambient-ish techno, some IDM flavour, old-school dub techno, acid. Tunes from veterans like Unit Moebius and Woody McBride are set against Breaker 1 2 and Bjarki. There's killer, obscure Russian techno (Species Of Fishes), the Icelandic electronica that helped inspire Kraviz's recent transformation (Biogen) and psychedelic efforts from Kraviz herself. There are stretches of dry minimalism and explosions of colour (like PTU's quirky "A Broken Clock Is Right Twice A Day"), along with трип's dreamworld plunderphonics. Thanks to their oddly hypnotic vocal samples, Kraviz's "You Are Wrong" and Bjarki's unsettling "Denise It Ain't Easy 2" are landmarks in the mix.

fabric 91 gets across Kraviz's unique musical world. She finds value in old records without making them sound old, primarily because of how well she matches them with the right new material. She's always done things her own way, and fabric 91 is the latest stubbornly weird milestone on her ascent. The mix's ending feels emblematic. Taken from Aphex Twin's SoundCloud dump last year, "Fork Rave" is bright and frenetic, and like the rest of fabric 91, it's old, new and never boring.